"HTH020 (The Haxan Cloak's Cloud of Witness)"

Not for nothing is one of the tracks on Akkord's HTH020 EP, released in June, titled "Greyscale"; the Manchester group's vision of techno is all charcoal streaks across brushed stainless steel, all thunderhead fury and graphite residue. If HTH020 were a weather report, it'd be for skies the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The Haxan Cloak adds no color in his remix of the record. In fact, he seems to have added little of anything at all. Instead, he's taken all four of the EP's tracks, melted them down and fused them together, in a process that feels damn near metallurgical. Listeners acquainted with the originals may recognize the odd element, preserved like a bug in amber: the basso grind of "Gravure", the bell-tone drone of "Continuum", the flayed hi-tom rhythms of "Typeface", and the all-consuming ash of "Greyscale". But even those reference points are quickly obliterated by Bobby Krlic's seismic migraine of a megamix, in which ambient rumble gives way to industrial dancehall, which gives way, in turn, to some real blast-furnace Wagner shit. Zippering slow-fast-slow-fast rhythms pile up like a funhouse hall of mirrors in an earthquake, and it all careens towards a cacophonous climax of which Ben Frost would surely approve. It's the perfect accompaniment to the Rosetta mission's close-up photos of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko: cold, desolate, and hurtling towards apocalypse.